Spectator's Journal/ Churchill and the Thatcherites
Reid, Stuart
F orget Camillagate. It surprised no one. What could be more natural than for the heir to the throne and future Supreme Governor of the Church of England to be on richly intimate terms with his...
...However, if Britain had made a separate peace with Germany—the big if in the revisionists' game of "what if...
...He was capable, furthermore, of treating men's lives with "undue levity...
...Nor was he ever keen on Churchill's "fraudulent rhetoric...
...Thatcher's social and economic liberalism—"don't ask me about monetarism and all that," says Charmley—but were attracted to her because of the Falklands war, with its echoes of empire, and the anti–working class thrust of her labor policies...
...Most critics have praised The End of Glory for its insights, with Thatcherite critics in the forefront...
...All the same, the smart papers treated the book as though it were not only new but daring and exciting and mold-breaking...
...He is a diligentresearcher, perhaps the only man alive who has read every one of Martin Gilbert's five million leaden words on Churchill...
...That would have freed Britain from the costly American alliance and might have saved the empire...
...He is a serious historian...
...In her recently published The Anatomy of Thatcherism,2 Shirley Robin Letwin notes: [Thatcherism] is a vision of Britain as a country of dynamism, wealth and power, but unencumbered by either the trappings of a great empire, or the Victorian angst associated with a world half of which is colored red...
...What was was...
...Though only nine when Churchill died in 1965, he knows his subject intimately...
...Wells, and Malcolm Muggeridge...
...The Sage of Robertsbridge was something of a ham...
...For fifty years before Thatcherism, the Conservative party struggled with Britain's imperial heritage, never quite shaking off a belief in or at least a nostalgia for empire...
...Yet many Thatcherites, often the best known and most articulate, are weighed down with imperial hangups...
...an inability to come to terms with Britain's decline as an imperial power...
...Alas, the glory days are gone...
...The Home Counties did not like this smarty-pants approach to the man who brought them their Finest Hour...
...the empire might have survived, and Attlee might have been denied power...
...But there is paranoia in revisionist theory, at least as it applies in this country to World War II...
...Less responsible elements reacted with ill-concealed glee...
...there was "something malign and disagreeable" about him...
...In January the conservatives joined a motley band of crop-haired fascists and wacko socialists in a march on Downing Street in protest against Maastricht...
...Then too conservatives, socialists, and fascists were united in their opposition to European entanglements...
...He is, in other words, a member of England's aspiring class...
...so did the news desks of the posher newspapers...
...By July 1945 the first of these was on the skids, the second dependent upon America and the third had vanished in a Labour election victory...
...The same is true of Attlee's socialist revolution...
...Sooner or later on the revisionists' road you are bound to make their acquaintance...
...Indeed, he is in some respects a model Thatcherite...
...It was only a matter of time...
...At the moment, by happy irony, he is teaching history at Fulton, Missouri...
...There are no more Argies to waste or heads to crack...
...Charmley is not one of their number...
...n fact, the empire was doomed long before the Atlantic Charter was signed and the special relationship with America sealed...
...T his thesis is not, of course, without interest, but, for all the hype and horror that attended the publication of The End of Glory, it is notnew...
...At the same time, conservative Thatcherites are beginning to see Lady Thatcher's hand in the present difficulties of the monarchy...
...what is is...
...He had long believed that Bolshevism and National Socialism were twin evils...
...Britain merely avoided defeat...
...History does not repeat itself, but there is a fearful, and farcical, symmetry to it...
...In Charmley's view, Churchill was not in the end a great war leader, because Britain conspicuously failed to win the war...
...All that now unites Lady Thatcher and the conservative Thatcherites is Europe, or rather, opposition to Europe...
...All that is left of Thatcherism, in the parliamentary Tory party at least, is privatization, meritocracy, John Major, and recession...
...He comes from a humble home, went to a state school, abandoned Methodism for Anglicanism, and now speaks with a plummy accent...
...Mock-Tudor roadhouses in Surrey rang with denunciations...
...His students there know him as a big, bearded Harris-Tweedy chap...
...High tables groaned with delight...
...A message from Mrs...
...Hitler, he said, was not contemplating general war in 1939, and probably not intending war at all...
...In 1989 Maurice Cowling, fellow of Peterhouse, Cambridge, and sometime guru to young fogeys, argued, albeit in the equivocal voice, that Britain ought not have gone to war fifty years before: Though the balance is a fine one, Russian (and American) domination of Europe after a long war, the destruction of Germany, and the emasculation of the British Empire were probably worse for Britain than German domination of Europe might have been if it had been effected without the emasculation of Empire...
...In the past year, Lady Thatcher and her conservative supporters have parted company over Bosnia (she is for military intervention, they are not) and Hong Kong (she is full of praise for Governor Chris Patten's attempts to extend democracy, they for the most part are not...
...He] had nothing to offer the British people in 1945, and no one has been prepared seriously to argue that he did...
...The Cambridge historian and keeper of the Churchill Archives, Correlli Barnett, spoke indignantly of Charmley's "glib speculation...
...Even during the war there were skeptics and Churchill-bashers in Blighty...
...The division over Churchill is only the latest sign...
...Churchill stood for the British Empire, for British independence, and for an "anti-socialist" vision...
...These are the conservative Thatcherites, the men who never had much time for Mrs...
...Thatcher was read out in Trafalgar Square...
...Revisionist history is a useful antidote to the sanitized and politically correct "propaganda of the victors...
...The baroness is not a republican, but her popular capitalism, her enthusiasm for the currency dealer with a satellite dish on his roof and a chip on his shoulder, did not strengthen the position of monarchy...
...Charmley is not a conspiracy nut...
...What could be more natural than for the heir to the throne and future Supreme Governor of the Church of England to be on richly intimate terms with his mistress...
...When in 1950 he visited the old man on behalf of the Daily Telegraph, he was not impressed by the boiler-suited bonhomie...
...We are not living in the Dark Ages, for God's sake...
...The revisionists want to blame someone, and their tendency is to blame Churchill and his pal Roosevelt...
...Yet there are times when Charmley's work, like the work of all revisionists, leaves one asking: So what...
...Tony Benn (republican, leveler, formerly Lord Stansgate) gave a swivel-eyed speech...
...He is a Thatcherite...
...One thinks of Evelyn Waugh, George Bernard Shaw, H.G...
...Not all Thatcherites go along with Charmley, however...
...And it is no coincidence, as they say, that the attacks on the crown have been fiercest in the newspapers she liked best (and which liked her best)—the Murdoch papers...
...The Dominion countries of Australia, New Zealand, and South Africa had been self-governing since the turn of the century (Canada since 1867) and were therefore hardly part of an empire in any traditional sense...
...By the 1920s, furthermore, the Colonial Office was committed to "nativization," and by the 1930s Indian demands for independence were becoming irresistible...
...It was only a matter of time before Labour was returned to power...
...There we find Churchill "oddly lovable...
...She has a mystical reverence for "Winston," as she calls him...
...Then there are the loonies, the men and women with annotated copies of The Protocols of the Elders of Zion in their rucksacks...
...There is something to be said for his interpretation of the war...
...He was] flabby and puffy, and, in some indefinable way, obscene," he recalled in the first volume of his memoirs (1972...
...But she has none at all for empire...
...Perhaps, though, there is something a tad fraudulent about Muggeridge himself...
...The fact is that revisionists have been doing brisk business these past thirty years and more...
...They were not beholden to a metropolitan power...
...Not every cloud has a silver lining...
...No, the real surprise of the year so far has been John Charmley's revisionist life of Winston Churchill, in which the Great Warrior is judged and found wanting...
...There were golf umbrellas and old country coats and plus-foursand Doc Martens boots...
...he true significance of The End of T Glory, then, lies not in what it tells us about 1945 but in what it tells us about 1993...
...Especially of Muggeridge, who was convinced in 1939 that the war would have ruinous consequences...
...Who would deny, for example, that Yalta was Churchill's Munich...
...According to Charmley, Churchill betrayed Britain's interests by selling us out to the Yanks, abandoning the Empire, and making safe the ways of socialism...
...Another ham (and mischief-maker), the socialist historian A.J.P...
...The Soviet Union and the United States won the war...
...In the controversy that followed the publication of Charmley's book, some unsentimental conservatives pointed out that in a Nazi-dominated Continent there would never have been a liberal consensus, which would have been bad news for anti-colonial elements in general and the Labour party in particular...
...The policy of "unconditional surrender" was a mistake, says Charmley...
...Here is how, in Churchill: The End of Glory,' he sums up his case: At the end of the war [Churchill] was, once again, faced with what looked like an attempt by one power to dominate the Continent, an odd result for so much expenditure of treasure and manpower...
...They were also united in their opposition to Churchill...
...He was pretty sure it did not...
...What it tells us is that Thatcherism is cracking up...
...It is impossible not to be reminded of the 1930s...
...Over the years, Taylor's idea has been refined and recast...
...Thatcherism, in its post-imperial modernity, has suffered no such hang-ups...
...Taylor, famously maintained in The Origins of the Second World War (1961) that the war came about as the result of a series of misunderstandings, what we would today call a "failure of communication...
...It was a sad spectacle...
...One who does not is Lady Thatcher...
...Great Britain's interests would have been better served if Churchill had sought some sort of accommodation with the Germans—though not necessarily with Hitler...
...But it would have been bad news too for the Tory party, not to mention the Board of Deputies of British Jews, and it would have left Britain a satrapy of Germany, a fate that even unsentimental conservatives might have found less congenial than the special relationship...
...The same meeting is recorded in respectful tones in his diaries...
...At the end of the war, in the ruins of Berlin, he asked himself whether what he saw represented the triumph of good over evil...
...He likes to tease, but he is not a tease...
...Some mold, as Churchill might have said, some break...
...Channley's book is pure Thatcher in its anglocentricity, in its implied antipathy to foreign (i.e., European) entanglements, but it is heretical in its hostility to Churchill and its nostalgia for empire...
Vol. 26 • April 1993 • No. 4
